Recurse Center Weeks 1-3

I’ve been remiss about blogging my experiences at the Recurse Center, so I will try to make up for lost time here. Some of my highlights/accomplishments from the first two weeks are:

• Submitting my first real pull request to a large open source project. It’s a small one, and it hasn’t been approved yet, but it did fix a bug and pass all of the tests!
  • Also kind of helped debug an issue with Zulip development environments on OS X.
• Worked on the first half of MIT’s 6.006 with a group of other RCers. It’s a lot of fun to have a problem set discussion group again.
  • Paired with another RCer to implement a minheap in Python.
• Learned some Go and started on the Cryptopals cryptography challenges using Go.
• Helped debug an interesting issue in Docker, involving curious behavior with APFS and sparse files.
  • This was a prerequisite to help another RCer get started with automatic image captioning using neural networks.
• Scanned dozens of documents, pamphlets, and hand-outs from tourist sites across the US, and am exploring spatial organization methods for browsing them.
• Gave a non-technical presentation on the history of New York City’s water supply.
  • Dug into some open watershed data, interested in an interactive/browsable version of some of the comparison images I made in this presentation.

• Learned a bit about shaders, made some pretty colors.
• Started learning more about relational databases and how to manage them well.
• Revived an old project with new input data (aerial photography) to generate “perspectiveless aerial photography.”

Interstate (January 2018) from Logan Williams on Vimeo.

china-cropped.mp4 from Logan Williams on Vimeo.

• Went for a really nice hike in the Hudson Highlands.

Those were the first three weeks! Hard to believe that it’s one quarter over.